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Disney executives delivered a tidy CinemaCon session in Las Vegas packed with sequels, reboots and spin-offs like Avatar: Fire & Ash, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and Tron: Ares. Executives noted – unsurprisingly – that the studio and its labels has ranked number one in Hollywood for eight out of the past nine years and keeps films exclusively in cinemas longer than any of its rivals.

Judging from the steady stream of whoops and applause from the crowd of exhibitors at The Colosseum in Caesars Palace on Thursday, the formula works, and Disney’s appetite for revisiting familiar territory well into 2028 and beyond suits them well.

A common theme of studio presentations, panels and conversations with the industry this week has been the need to supply variety, in bulk and frequently. Disney is doing that, even if the source material is familiar.

Making his first appearance for his new employers after departing Warner Bros, Andrew Cripps, Disney’s head of theatrical distribution, urged cinema owners to do more to help reach audiences by teaming up on in-theatre campaigns, and sharing customer data to keep them coming back.

With first quarter box office trailing that of 2024 by roughly 10-11% the call for a more collegial relationship has been a common refrain of this CinemaCon. The tentpoles for this year and beyond cannot come fast enough.

Oscar winner Zoe Saldana introduced a taped segment from James Cameron, who is in New Zealand working on 20th Century Studios’ Avatar: Fire And Ash and introduced footage to his latest trip to Pandora. The fantasy heavyweight opens on December 19 and is bidding to emulate 2009’s Avatar and 2022’s Avatar: The Way Of Water, which rank first and third in the all-time top three box office smashes on $2.9bn and $2.3bn, respectively.

Cameron is under no illusion about the challenge facing the theatrical business and issued the traditional rallying cry to exhibitors, noting, “We’re still struggling after the one-two punch of the pandemic and streaming.”

Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige also sent in a message and is in London, about to start principal photography with the Russo brothers on May 2026 release Avengers: Doomsday. Feige teed up footage from July 25 release The Fantastic Four: First Steps  – the latest attempt to deliver on a property that has been tough to crack down the years.

Everyone hopes the latest film about Reed Richards and his family will deliver. TV specialist Matt Shakman (WandaVision, Succession, Game Of Thrones) directs an appealing lead cast of Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Barach, and Joseph Quinn, who is now a Beatle.

There was also footage from May 2 release Thunderbolts*, about the motley crew of antiheroes, with stars David Harbour, Florence Pugh, Wyatt Russell, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus onstage to whip up enthusiasm.

Saldana returned to show extended 3D footage from Pixar’s Elio, which opens on June 29. The gorgeously rendered story about an imaginative youngster’s interstellar adventures follows in the footsteps of last year’s $1.7bn global hit Inside Out 2, which studio brass will hope has retrained audiences to some degree to seek out animation in cinemas after the pandemic years when several Pixar titles went straight to Disney+.

Ke Huy Quan, who voices the snake Gary, talked up November 26 tentpole Zootopia 2, the sequel to 2016 $1bn hit predecessor.

Cripps showed footage from Lilo & Stitch (May 23), Freakier Friday (August 8) – with a little onstage promotion from Jamie Lee Curtis and CinemaCon Vanguard Award recipient Lindsay Lohan, who reprise their mother-daughter characters from the 2003 body swap comedy remake Freaky Friday.

Jeff Bridges and Jared Leto showed a sneak peak from the sci-fi action-adventure October 10 release Tron: Ares from Joachim Rønning, and Cripps teed up a trailer from April 11 spy thriller The Amateurs starring Rami Malek as a vengeful CIA operative. Elle Fanning teased the audience with the first trailer from Dan Trachtenberg’s November 7 release Predator: Badlands from 20th Century Studios. All were well received.

Curtis later joined Emma Mackey to talk about Ella McCay, an original comedy drama about an idealistic young politician from James L. Brooks (Terms Of Endearment, Broadcast News), who received the Cinema Verite Award from Alan Bergman, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment.

Brooks extolled the virtues of the communal viewing experience and said, “Heaven is people watching a film together in a big auditorium eating popcorn, and the butter is fresh.” He agreed with Cinema United head Michael O’Leary’s call for a minimum 45-day exclusive theatrical window.

Jeremy Allen White from The Bear and fellow cast member Jeremy Strong from Succession took to the stage to show footage of White singing as Bruce Springsteen in Scott Cooper’s biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, which is not yet dated.

The crowd enjoyed the first trailer from Jay Roach’s August 29 release The Roses, a reimagining of Danny DeVito’s 1989 dark comedy The War Of The Roses that this time stars Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as a feuding couple.

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